Survey Shows 20% Cryptocurrency Owners Used Credit Cards

2/8/2018 10:00 AM ET

About a fifth of cryptocurrency owners bought the currency using their credit cards, according to a survey conducted by cryptocurrency news service CoinDesk. The survey among 3,000 people revealed that about 20 percent of the respondents were desperate enough to buy cryptocurrencies and used credit cards as they may have been short of cash.

The survey also noted that out of the 20 percent about half of them have paid back their credit card dues.

The survey was conducted for CoinDesk's "Q4 State of Blockchain Report", which also states that the cryptocurrency market cap doubled from the third quarter of 2017 before hitting an all-time high of $600 billion.

Earlier in the week, banking majors around the world, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Lloyds Banking, had banned their customers from buying bitcoin, the highly volatile cryptocurrency leader, or other cryptocurrencies with a credit card.

Banks and financial institutions are also worried about their clients running up hefty debt that they may find difficult to repay.

Payment processors VISA and Mastercard have also made it more difficult to acquire cryptocurrencies as they started charging additional fees for instant purchase of cryptocurrencies using debit or credit cards, the technology news website TechCrunch reported.

The prices of digital currencies have been volatile, more to the downside, amid negative developments in the crypto market. They incluced ad ban by Facebook, and India as well as other regulators around the world taking strong stance against it .

The price of bitcoin has more than halved from its all-time high of nearly $20,000 in mid-December 2017. No different are other major digital currencies.

At coinmarketcap, bitcoin was at $8,431.62 as of 9.57 am ET, up 2.01 percent.

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